8/16/2023 0 Comments Happenstance packs![]() More than previous years I was left wondering what the point of all this was. Calling out the overt absence of freeness surrounding the Biennale, despite its curators’ explicit theme, is a cheap shot, but highlights the tension between lofty curatorial concepts and the reality that plays out here every two years.Ģ018 is fairly flat with the Biennale punching well below its weight, with precious few moments to set the pulse racing: Peter Salter made a delightfully nutty table gliding around on skateboard trucks, Smiljan Radić cast a chapel using bubble wrap, Assemble squished 8,000 beautiful marbled tiles into existence, the Swiss played games with scale, the V&A clumsily bolted together the decapitated corpse of a decanted working‐class council flat, and Lithuania made a swamp. In Venice, Freespace is a controlled space. ![]() To get in, I join a long queue snaking towards a security barrier where officials check my papers and identity card, watched over by armed police. Tempest is in town to open Caruso St John’s British Pavilion with some performance poetry, but her overheard unflattering summation of the Biennale speaks volumes.Īccess to Freespace costs 30 euros. Curated by Grafton Architects under the title Freespace, it is a sprawling array of installations and giddy prosecco receptions making up the architecture world’s most epic exhibition. The ‘trade fair’ is the 16 th International Architecture Exhibition better known as the 2018 Venice Biennale. The poet Kate Tempest raises her voice above the hubbub to be heard at the other end of her phone call, ‘I can’t’, she says with perhaps too little discretion, ‘I’m at an architecture trade fair’. A standout triumph of Freespace is Scotland’s rebellious contribution which exuberantly challenges the entire edifice of the Biennale with a participatory pavilion-cum-festival as much of Scotland as of Venice
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